Visual Streamlining for Timeline Charts

At Explore Analytics, we are always looking for opportunities to visually improve our product based on feedback from our customers and best design practices. As such, we have made a few subtle changes to our visualizations in order to simplify and enhance the look and feel.

This is an example of a timeline view from a few weeks ago:

This is the same timeline in the product after the visual changes:

The key changes are:

In the old timeline chart, the entire chart is ringed in a black border; this black border has been removed.

In the old timeline chart, there are horizontal gridlines for the Y-Axis and vertical gridlines for the X-Axis; the vertical gridlines have been removed.

In the old timeline chart, the X-Axis has a blue background; this background has been removed.

Single-line timeline charts will now use a color for the line, instead of using a black line.

In addition to these visual changes, a change has been made to the Timeline slider's behavior. This timeline is zoomed in on a portion of the data, with the slider at the bottom visible:

The change in behavior is that if this chart is set to 'Max' (showing the full set of data from beginning to end), the slider will now hide automatically:

This behavior change, like the visual changes above, is intended visually simplify the user interface and minimize the number of extraneous pixels included as part of the visualization.